GuildQuality

GuildQuality’s mission is to elevate the stature of our profession to a level commensurate with its importance. We’re working toward that goal in two major ways:

First, our customer satisfaction surveying and reporting helps our members deliver an exceptional experience. Second, we expend a great deal of energy in celebrating superlative performance within our membership. We do that via our Qlist, via the member news in this blog, and, once a year, we do that with the Guildmaster Awards.

This year, 107 companies qualified for a Guildmaster Award. Some of these companies specialize in siding and window installation. Most build and sell homes. Many are remodelers. A few are community developers. Despite their differences, they all share a passion for excellence, and all of them focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience.

What follows is an explanation of how we went about identifying the 2009 Award Winners.

Qualifications of winners. Over the last two months, we examined more than 8,000 surveys received on behalf of applicants for the 2009 Guildmaster Awards. To receive an award, an applicant must have earned the recommendation of at least 90% of the customers who responded to our surveys. Additionally, we must have received responses from at least 70% of their customers.

For companies with more than 20 customers per year (about two thirds of the winners), we had to have surveyed every customer from 2009. For companies with fewer than 20 customers, we had to have surveyed their most recent twenty customers — for many, that meant we surveyed customers from as long ago as 2005.

Exemptions. A handful of the winners exempted some customers from surveying. Where they did so, it is noted in the “exceptions” link next to each winner. Companies could not pick and choose specific customers to exclude, but rather, they could exclude customers for projects below a certain dollar amount. As examples, some custom homebuilders didn’t re-survey repeat customers for whom they did remodeling projects and some remodelers didn’t survey customers with projects under $5,000.

Types of awards. We gave out three types of awards: Guildmaster, Guildmaster with Distinction, and Guildmaster with Highest Distinction. The three distinctions relate to the response rate we received during the surveying: 80% or above received “Distinction” and 90% or above received “Highest Distinction.”

A note on response rates. A great many of our applicants achieved the recommendation rate necessary to win, but did not have a response rate that was 70% or greater. In years past, this has frustrated some candidates. Response rates correlate strongly with overall satisfaction — which is one of the reasons we reference it. But we also recognize that response rates fluctuate depending on the company’s type of work. Very large volume homebuilders, apartment developers, property managers, and replacement or specialty contractors often have a slightly lower survey response rate than remodelers or custom homebuilders. This puts the former group at a disadvantage. We recognize that issue, and we are exploring ways to accommodate that in future years.

A few words on honesty. It is important to note that we relied on each company to provide a complete and unabridged list of their customers for surveying. In many markets, we can verify customer lists via the public record, but in most, this is not presently possible. As such, we rely on the general public to let us know if they are a past customer of an award winner, but were never surveyed. This has happened from time to time, and has led to the revocation of the company’s award. Fortunately, this is a remote occurrence, and as awareness of the Guildmaster Awards has grown, the self-policing component has become more and more of a deterrent.

Congratulations to the 2009 Guildmaster Award Winners! Thanks for your commitment to quality, and best wishes for continued success.

From a McKinsey Quarterly Interview with Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian (courtesy of FlowingData):

The ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it – that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.

In high school, I took mathematical modeling instead of calculus. The mathematical modeling course exposed students to spreadsheets and predictive models. My father had introduced me to Lotus 1-2-3 some time before and I was already hooked on data, so this course was truly exciting for me.

I remember finding historical records of gray wolf, elk and deer populations on Vancouver Island, BC, and identifying correlations between their growth and decline and weather patterns. I recall building a model that described the relationship between the sun and the temperature of the earth’s surface at sunrise and sunset. This one semester class gave me more foundational blocks for my business career than any college course (with the possible exception of accounting).

While the models we were building may have described timber growth or human populations, the skills I learned enabled me to build business models and, later, create GuildQuality. So clearly, I am biased, but I enthusiastically echo Varian’s sentiments.

Henderer Design+Build has an excellent company profile on Facebook. If you are a Facebook user, click here to access it.

Mark Miles and I were in DC last week. While walking from our hotel to dinner, we spotted one of Carnemark‘s projects on R Street:

Multifamily Executive reports on more research (this time from the ULI), about the burden of commuting. It seems that if the days of “drive till you qualify” aren’t yet over, they are definitely threatened. There is a rising chorus of research affirming that the housing savings associated with lengthy commutes are washed away by the fully-loaded cost of the drive. This echoes a similar story reported by BusinessWeek, and mentioned here, a couple years ago.

One of GuildQuality’s growth areas has been specialty contractors and home services companies. Nevertheless, in my conversations with members, they are almost always surprised to learn that we can work with their plumbers, electricians, landscape contractors, etc.

GuildQuality is likely to be a great fit for just about any type of home services company — especially those that directly serve the consumer market. So if you work with HVAC contractors, electricians, plumbers, landscape installers and maintenance contractors, and you think they’d enjoy learning more about GuildQuality, we’d welcome the introduction.

Our “Build the Guild” referral program is designed to help grow our community, which benefits everyone.  The referring member receives a credit equal to the new member’s first monthly fee, up to $500.  To connect a prospective member with GuildQuality, simply email them a link to our free trial sign-up page, or let us know who they are and a member of our team will reach out to them.

Connecting your contractors with GuildQuality gives them a no-obligation opportunity to test drive our surveying and reporting system. And ultimately, that will help your valued partners improve their businesses, and reduce the cost of your service at the same time.

Tomorrow morning, we are rolling out an overhaul of the marketing-related services GuildQuality offers. These features are available to our super- and admin-users only. To access them, log in to your account and click on the “New” Marketing Admin.

Here’s the major enhancements you’ll find. First, we’re showing you how many people are checking out your published GuildQuality-related information: Your Qlist Profile, your Listings, and your Customer Report.

The next major thing you’ll find is a complete overhaul and redesign of the Customer Report. The Customer Report allows you to summarize your survey feedback, and share it with anyone you like. If you are presently using an old version of that report, I encourage you to switch to the new one. All of the old ones will redirect to the new ones beginning on July 1. But more importantly, the updated version is FAR better looking, FAR more flexible, and as inferred in the image above, you can publish a link to it in your Qlist Profile.

With the new Customer Report, you can choose which questions to include, as well as what time frame to represent. In addition, the report discloses a lot more to the viewer about its context — i.e. the time period represented by the responses, and the date of the last response.

The last major change relates to the Qlist. We changed the weighting of the default sort order, so that recent survey activity drives you closer to the top, and a lack of recent survey activity drives you closer to the bottom. The other factor that influences how high up you appear is the amount of content in your profile — do you have a bio, a logo, listings, photos, etc. The more you put in, the higher up you appear.

[This release follows on the heels of our recent expansion to the Qlist and introduction of Homes for Sale and Examples of Work. Read more about that here.]

We serve all segments of the building and real estate profession, and we watch the trends within our own membership. It was no surprise to me that remodeling has dramatically gained market share in residential investment. What did surprise me, however, is that in Q4 2008 more was invested in home improvement than any other segment. (courtesy of CalculatedRisk)